Cleanup costs grow by $600M
OTTAWA — The debts associated with cleaning up the federal government’s environmental liabilities, including sites with explosive weapons, grew by about $600 million over the past year, according to financial records tabled in Parliament on Tuesday.
The financial liabilities, associated mainly with contamination of about 2,400 sites from industrial and other activities, reached about $8.36 billion as of March 31, 2012, according to the public accounts documents released by Treasury Board President Tony Clement.
The documents also suggested these liabilities for cleanup costs could still increase by as much as $1.5 billion in the future, depending on ongoing evaluations.
The total estimate of the known liabilities reflected an increase from liabilities of about $7.75 billion, estimated one year earlier.
The liabilities included 43 sites with potentially explosive weapons that were identified by the Department of National Defence.
These sites were estimated to cost about $4 million to clean up, but management has also estimated possible additional costs ranging from $180 million to $524 million to deal with the unexploded weapons possibly left over from past military operations, the government said.
The newly released records also suggest additional cleanup costs for contaminated sites of $1.1 billion that were considered to be “undeterminable at this time.”
“These adjustments will be accrued in the year in which they become known,” said the records released by Clement.
Plans to clean up the contaminated sites and those with unexploded weapons were established in 2005 by the government of Liberal prime minister Paul Martin. The Department of National Defence also notes on its website the unexploded weapons can be “difficult” to identify and unpredictable.
But costs have steadily risen as the government agencies, departments and Crown corporations identified additional liabilities they were responsible for cleaning up.
Environment Minister Peter Kent, who recently an- nounced the Harper government would pursue a new phase of the $3.5-billion Liberal plan, has said federal investments to clean up sites would create jobs while undoing the mess left by “uninformed practices” of industry from previous decades.
The list of federal stakeholders with environmental liabilities is wide-ranging, including the CBC, which must spend an estimated $300,000 to clean up polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and oil contaminants at two transmission sites in eastern Quebec.
Parliament’s environment monitor, Scott Vaughan, recently warned the government it was facing a $500-million shortfall in funds needed to address sites that were already assessed.